Alec vs Alec
by MysticDew
Summary: We know that Alec eventually finds a way to put a com in people's heads. But there's another Alec out there, one that already knows how to get a voice in your ear.
1. No Arguments Here

Alec Hardison was a hard person to hack. Ok, he was an impossible person to hack; until about 20 minutes ago. He had been harmlessly hacking some security cameras in Canada to find facial recognition on Parker, when he realized he wasn't alone; someone else was looking at the same footage. It was only a few minutes later that someone else had slipped into his system.

Of course, Hardison hacked him right after, leaving them at a stalemate, but it was the initial infacture that messed with him.

The words appeared on Hardison's screen. He quickly moved to another monitor, typing to the mystery hacker:

The hacker started to access his files; Hardison's fourth screen suddenly lit up as he hit his firewalls. Those were his files. His files. Nobody touched those files, not even Nate. (Of course, that thought sent him tumbling into a slew of places he didn't want to be right now, so he got back on track.) He, in turn, broke through his competitor's most recent wall, picking some choice files for himself.

The words appeared on Hardison's first monitor. He very visibly grabbed another file, and more words appeared.

Hardison scoffed, but really, the typer was right. The best move he could make was call a truce.

The cursor blinked, unmoving, for a few seconds. Just as Hardison was starting to relax, a box popped up on his screen. "Skype? Really?" He said aloud. He didn't need to ask how the kid had made the connection. He knew just how he would do it, if it were him initiating the call. He pressed the call button obligingly, however, and was met with an unfamiliar face.

"Hold up, hold up. You were the one who broke in?" The kid – for he was a kid, nineteen tops – frowned at him. The boy's light skin was somewhat lost in the glare of the camera, but as the kid moved back in his seat, he got a clearer view. He really was young, wild hair framing his boyish face. Hardison didn't want to think about his chances when this kid grew up.

"I may be young, but you can't deny that I know my stuff." He said, crossing his arms defensively.

Hardison held up his hands, and said with a quirk of his lips, "No arguments here."

The boy smiled, and Hardison thought it was too honest, too goddamn innocent for the guy who just proved he could trash his entire system. "No, really. I've never met anyone who could get that far into my system; who are you?"

Hardison had to refrain from rolling his eyes. He looked at the kid seriously, "You first."

The other hacker really did roll his eyes, but offered up what Hardison had to believe was an honest reply. "My name is Alec Sadler." He said simply.

Hardison chuckled dryly. "Oh, you're not gonna believe this." He gave himself one more second of grinning at the camera, before replying, "My name is Alec Hardison."

Alec's eyebrows tightened, before a slow smile took over his face.

"I'm gonna chalk this up to coincidence, unless you know something I don't." Hardison said, crossing his arms. The only person who could hack Hardison as well as Hardison could hack him, and he was named Alec? He honestly wasn't sure what it meant, but freaky coincidence seemed like the only option.

Alec mirrored him, folding his arms tightly in front of him consideringly. and Hardison appreciated the show of trust. In the world of computers, the worst thing you can do to slow you down is to have your hands occupied. Especially with someone as good as Sadler, a second's head start could throw him farther behind than he'd like to think about.

It was Alec's turn for his lips to quirk up into a smile. "No arguments here."


	2. Better than Skype

With a truce secured, both Alecs felt safe in going back to their normal lives. For Hardison, that meant searching for Parker – since the crew split up four months ago, she had literally disappeared off the grid.

For Alec, this meant a quiet life at his family's farm, dodging his stepdad and stepbrother who seemed convinced that technology was the root of all evil. He spent all his time coding, writing new programs and coming up with idle ideas for inventions in his spare time. He also got his GED, because school had already been a waste of time for the 17 year old, and he didn't really want to go back for another year.

(In the back of his mind, he admitted to himself that if he ever needed credentials, he could create them for himself; there was no reason to sit through college just for a degree.) His chores were pretty mindless, brushing the horses down, taking them on rides when they needed it, cleaning out the stalls. He had plenty of time to think about things, and that's how he found himself re-initiating contact with Hardison.

He hacked the CIA, NSA and FBI servers - eventually, he'd get company, be it Hardison or another hacker. But it seemed that his fellow Alec was often using web crawls similar to the one that had lived in his server for a few minutes, so his software would identify the familiarities - like a white blood cells to a virus, he thought bemusedly - and, in a week or so, he'd hit the bullseye.

Turns out, he didn't have to wait long at all. A google hangouts page popped up on one of his many screens. "Really, google hangouts?" He said aloud.

Hardison's face popped up with a zipping sound, and he smirked. "Better than Skype," he argued.

Alec adjusted his headset, fiddling with the microphone. "Everyone has Skype." He shrugged. "And its easier to hack. Some people don't have google."

Hardison snorted, but let the subject drop. "So," he started, "What are you looking for?"

"Oh, me?" Alec leaned back in his chair, forcing nonchalance. "I was bored."

"You were looking for me - you found me! Nobody just finds me cause they're bored." Hardison muttered on angrily. "That's my system. Ain't nobody who can track my system."

Alec had to refrain from laughing. The American did have a certain charm, when he knew they were on the same side. He responded dryly, and the time flew for the two hackers. Alec soon realized they had been chatting on and off for hours. At some point one of them would chuckle or scoff, and it was nice to have someone there who understood why google glass was so interesting, or why people who thought HTML was a language were ridiculous.

It got to the point that they had a video chat set up pretty much 24/7, even if they only spoke twice a week. (They had long ago abandoned both Skype and Google Hangouts, after Hardison complained that they could make a better one in an hour. They beat his estimate by ten minutes).

"Yo, man, what's up?"

Alec jumped as Hardison's voice brought him out of his reminiscing. "Not much, Hardison. Is something wrong?" Hardison sent a picture to his screen of a design for what looked like a bluetooth, but… "Hardison, this is amazing!"

"What's not so amazing is that the new upgrades aren't working." He grumped, glaring at the screen.

"But with what you have now, that's… that's revolutionary. That would ruin the global market in a day! You could make millions."

"Who needs millions? Money, I got. What I don't got is the solution to this glitch." Alec froze, looking up at his webcam. Hardison seemed to notice, because he stipulated, "You've never stolen money before?"

Alec squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. "I haven't-"

Hardison cut him off. "Alec, Alec, I'm not judging you. If anything, you know, you should be judging me! But I don't do that anymore. Well, ok, I still have money whenever I need it, but I haven't stolen something for the heck of it for over a year."

Alec calmed down and tilted his head. However he had expected this conversation to go, it obviously wasn't going to go there. Hardison's voice cut through his internal musings as he babbled on. "Ok, maybe I should just take it from the beginning. Now, over a year ago, I got this offer…"


	3. Intrusion

p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Deep down, Alec knew he was a good person. He knew that, when he was given the opportunity, he would always choose to help people as opposed to not./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"None of Alec's mindset prepared him for Hardison's story. It was amazing, absolutely astonishing, to see what Hardison and his team had done. Admittedly, the whole "wrong acts, right reasons" mindset was flawed somehow, but Alec couldn't figure out how it was flawed, so he didn't worry about it too much. When he asked Hardison about it, his commentary made Alec's jaw drop./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;""I had never worried about it, before Nate. He took four good, honest criminals and gave us a conscience! I should really be more offended than I am." Hardison crossed his arms, but a smile crept on his face. "Still, we did some pretty sweet stuff. You know, one of my fake I.D's for Parker actually got jury duty?"/p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;""You're kidding!" Alec gasped./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;""Nah, it was completely real. And we discovered that there is in fact a conspiracy lurking behind every routine government operation."/p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Alec shook his head. "Someone was pulling the strings in a court case that Parker's alias just happened to be assigned to? I don't buy it."/p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Hardison smirked. "You want to check it out? Oh, by the way, I'm also a well qualified lawyer." He scratched his head and looked away. "Completely unrelated, of course."/p  
hr style="margin: 0.875em auto 1.2525em; border-style: solid; width: 359.234375px; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 19.444320678710938px; background-color: #ffffff;" /  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"br /span style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"It was a real eye opener, when he overheard his stepdad's animated speeches. He actually found himself nodding along, agreeing with some of the things he said. With some of the things Hardison said./span/p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Alec found himself researching Nathan Ford, Sophie Devereaux, Parker, and Eliot Spencer. They were all a force in their own right, but as a functioning unit, they were unstoppable. It made Alec long for a team of his own./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He spent his idle evenings helping Hardison with the coms, and reviewing their old marks, matching up the heists to the resulting change in different corporations./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;""... And I realized, really what you need to do is take out a lynchpin of corruption, like that lady from the court case. Anyway once that's out, the system runs itself as designed. Honestly." He relayed to Hardison, shaking his head at the simplicity./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Hardison nodded, like Alec coming to that conclusion was his intent the whole time. (Alec knew better, though. There was a reason Nathan Ford was the mastermind.)/p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"When Alec had finally researched just about everything "Leverage Incorporated" he could find - including the extensive FBI and INTERPOL files, a month had passed. While he did occasionally sit in on his stepdad's meetings, he spent most of his time experimenting and inventing in the barn. He had recently been toying with creating fake identities; it hadn't been a priority before, but if Hardison's experiences were anything to go by, they could come in very convenient in the future./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"One day, he finally caved and purchased a better webcam and a Raspberry Pi computer to run his Alecs program - he decided that their video chat system needed a name, and he wasn't overly original at making them./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"The plan was that the system to Hardison was completely separate from his other systems, and although Alec trusted the older man, but a hacker was a hacker. He probably wouldn't trust himself if he was face to face with his clone./p  
p dir="ltr" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Alec had finished the Raspberry Pi set up and was working on adjusting the frequency when something broke through his firewalls./p  
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"span style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;""Central? This is Cameron. I need back up."/span/p 


End file.
